Gender-Based Violence Survey
Also known as: GBV Survey, Violence Against Women Survey, VAW Prevalence Survey
Gender-based violence (GBV) and violence-against-women prevalence surveys are standardized, population-based instruments designed to estimate how many people — overwhelmingly women — experience physical, sexual, and emotional violence by intimate partners and others. The dominant designs are the WHO Multi-country Study on Women's Health and Domestic Violence and the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) domestic-violence module. They measure violence through behaviorally specific acts rather than the word 'violence', and they are conducted under strict ethical and safety protocols that govern who is interviewed, how, and where.
Key highlights
- Behaviorally specific, act-based items yield far higher and more valid disclosure than asking about 'violence' directly.
- Standardized WHO and DHS instruments allow comparison of prevalence across countries and over time.
- Probability sampling with weights produces estimates that generalize to the whole population.
- Built-in ethical and safety protocols protect respondents and improve data quality simultaneously.
Intuition
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How it works
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When to use it
Use a GBV prevalence survey when you need population-representative estimates of the extent of violence against women for monitoring, advocacy, or policy, especially where international comparability or Sustainable Development Goal reporting is required. The WHO and DHS designs are appropriate for national and subnational prevalence, trend monitoring, and linking violence to health outcomes. They are not appropriate for case identification of individuals, for settings where the ethical and safety protocol cannot be guaranteed, or where the goal is to study a perpetrator population or detailed psychological mechanisms rather than population prevalence.
Strengths & limitations
- Behaviorally specific, act-based items yield far higher and more valid disclosure than asking about 'violence' directly.
- Standardized WHO and DHS instruments allow comparison of prevalence across countries and over time.
- Probability sampling with weights produces estimates that generalize to the whole population.
- Built-in ethical and safety protocols protect respondents and improve data quality simultaneously.
- Even with best-practice methods, stigma and fear cause substantial underreporting, so estimates are lower bounds.
- Most large studies interview only women, leaving male and other-gender victimization and perpetration largely unmeasured.
- Differences in act lists, reference periods, and partner definitions limit comparability across non-standardized instruments.
- The required safety protocol is resource-intensive and difficult to maintain in conflict, displacement, or low-privacy settings.
Common pitfalls
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Applications
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Frequently asked
Why is only one woman per household interviewed?
It serves both safety and statistics. Interviewing a single randomly selected eligible woman ensures that no two women in the same home are visibly drawn into a conversation about violence, which could provoke suspicion or retaliation from a partner. Statistically, it also avoids clustering of the violence outcome within households, keeping the sample design clean. The selection is randomized so the chosen respondent represents eligible women in that household.
Why use behaviorally specific acts instead of asking about 'violence'?
Many respondents do not label coercion, slapping, or forced sex as 'violence', especially where such behavior is normalized, and stigma further suppresses disclosure of the labeled concept. Asking about concrete acts — being hit, threatened, forced to have sex — lets respondents report what actually happened and lets the researcher classify it. This consistently yields higher, more valid prevalence estimates and makes results comparable across cultures and languages.
Are these survey estimates the true rate of violence?
No; they are best understood as lower bounds. Even with behaviorally specific items, trained female interviewers, and guaranteed privacy, fear, shame, and recall limits cause underreporting. The methodology is designed to minimize that gap, not eliminate it. Estimates should therefore be read as conservative, and any apparent decline must be checked against changes in willingness to disclose, not assumed to reflect a real fall in violence.
Sources
- 1.García-Moreno, C., Jansen, H. A. F. M., Ellsberg, M., Heise, L., & Watts, C. H. (2006). Prevalence of intimate partner violence: Findings from the WHO multi-country study on women's health and domestic violence. The Lancet, 368(9543), 1260–1269.
- 2.World Health Organization (2005). WHO Multi-country Study on Women's Health and Domestic Violence against Women: Initial Results on Prevalence, Health Outcomes and Women's Responses. WHO, Geneva.
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Cite this page
ScholarGate. (2026, June 22). Gender-Based Violence Survey. ScholarGate. https://scholargate.app/gender-studies/gender-based-violence-survey